Salmon Showers

There are bad parts about every job. It really doesn’t matter what line of work it is, there is always something that no one wants to do. These undesirable activities could range from cleaning the bathroom to writing a weekly newsletter to taking scrupulous product inventory. Many jobs out there have this one bad task, but the remaining duties are, at the very least, just decent enough to stick with it. Other jobs, however, have no rewarding duties and the ones that stand out as being particularly disagreeable are downright awful.

During the summer of 2009, I was in a small fishing village in southwestern Alaska called Naknek. I had taken a mid-management position at one of the many fish canneries there. It was my job to walk through the plant and ensure that everyone was following proper safety protocol in order to pass all health inspections, of which there are many. There were occasions where I had to remind someone to put on a beard net or to take out their earbuds and put in the mandatory ear plugs and sometimes I had to go wake someone up who didn’t show up to work on time. Occasionally people would be agreeable, sometimes they begrudgingly obeyed, and many times I thought I was going to get punched in the face. As unpleasant as that was it didn’t take more than four hours of my 16 hour workday and I often found myself looking for other things to do. One of the duties bequeathed to me was that of destroying cans that were unsuitable for sale. While this may sound innocuous, it was by far the worst part of my lousy job.

A can of salmon must go through many stages in the cannery before it’s ready to be palletized, loaded in a shipping container, and then sent to Seattle for worldwide distribution. Along the way there are hazards that can lead to contamination of the product that must result in a can’s demise. By far the most common is a can getting itself stuck in the machinery whereupon it gets completely mangled to the point of puncture. Another fatal move for a can is to fall on the floor immediately after being removed from the retort ovens. Due to the potential risk of bacterial contamination, these cans must be destroyed. Some cans fall off a pallet while being shrink-wrapped, get stuck in the shrink-wrap oven, and get cooked hundreds of times a day before being discovered. Finally several cans a day fall off the machinery before being cooked and sit, unnoticed by cannery workers, for up to several days while bacteria slowly eats away at the product. These were, by far, the worst to destroy.

One of my first days on the job, after doing my safety rounds, I was handed a box with about fifty cans, two, very standard, dollar-store-bought can openers, one with black handles and one with white handles, and a pair of exceptionally dull tin snips. I was instructed to open each can, dump the contaminated product into a bucket, which I would later dispose of in the grinder, and then put the empty cans, after being rinsed, into the dumpster. I could not simply throw the entire can, fish and all, into the dumpster for two reasons. First, was the liability of a cannery worker finding a dumpster full of cans, eating one, getting sick, and deciding to seek legal action against the cannery. Second was that bears are attracted to dumps in Alaska like college students are to a plastic Dixie cup kegger. As a result, the local dump required canneries to remove the fish from the cans completely before disposing of them.

After an excruciating five minutes with the black-handled opener where I failed to open a single can, I switched to the white one which was only slightly better. Even the thriftiest homemaker would have chucked either one of these openers into the dumpster years ago, but I was stuck with them and had a job to do, so I continued to power through. After a while, I was doing pretty well with the opening. I had figured out the perfect angle to hold the opener, which involved me leaning over the top of the can just slightly. If the cans were too mangled, they required the dull snips and creativity as the snips couldn’t cut through more than one layer of tin, but for many of the cans, the opener worked.

About halfway through my box of cans, I pulled out a harmless-looking unscathed can. I was happy because I had figured out how to maximize efficiency with the white-handled opener and I could open an unscathed can in less than half the time it took me to complete a mangled one. I angled myself just right with my face slightly above the lid of the can, squeezed the handles together and began to turn the cutting wheel. First I heard a small hissing noise coming from the can. Thinking nothing of it I kept turning and within seconds the seemingly innocent can turned into a six-foot geyser of rancid, bacteria-infested red salmon shooting into the Alaskan twilight as well as directly into my face.

I have had many malodorous encounters in my life from overflowing outhouses to stumbling upon a beached dolphin in Mexico, but this putrid stench was by far the worst and now I was covered in it with about 25 cans left to go and another twelve hours on the clock before I could shower off. I had discovered the lousiest part of my lousy job. I cleaned myself off as best I could and then set back to work ensuring this time not to lean over the cans despite losing the best angle for the worthless opener.

After several weeks on the job I learned to recognize cans by their slight bulges and knew when a stink-bomb was coming up. I learned that cans that fell into the shrink-wrap oven ballooned like a pan of Jiffy-Pop and the fish turned into a brown liquid that could be drained with two screwdriver punctures. I got exceptionally crafty with the snips and could cut my way through just about any mangled can in a matter of seconds and I learned to angle the geyser cans away from my body to avoid as much of the stench as possible which made the remaining hours of every day more manageable. I finished my obligation to the cannery in about five weeks, came home, and washed all my clothes many times. Despite the washing, the Carhartt pants I wore that summer still have a faint fishy odor nearly two-and-a-half years later. 

There are days when lessons don’t go well or students aren’t behaving or parents are complaining or meetings are dragging endlessly and those days can make me want to look for other lines of work. But on those difficult days I get home and look at my old Carhartts, take a deep breath and remember can disposal duty and getting a fetid salmon facial and I simply think, “Hey, it could be worse. At least I’m not in Naknek.”